If you don’t understand something look it up on YouTube

wooden letters, 11×2 metres, Val Badia Smach 2017, Luca Rossi 2017.

If you think about it, the centre around which our lives revolve is the screen. Quoting the poet Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827) and a song by the musical group ‘Elio e le Storie Tese’: ‘of life the centrepiece is the screen (and not the “tomb”)’. We prefer sharing on social networks to living a certain experience. If we don’t share on our screen we feel we have lived that experience less. If we are not on social networks, if we do not become the coloured surface of our mobile phone, we feel we exist less. Like beyond the coloured surface of Marilyn or Andy Warhol’s Campbell soups, beyond the surface of our screen there is a ‘big void’: a feeling of emptiness that we can experience when we lose our mobile phone with the thousands of information, photos and videos it contains.

In this situation we do not need to express ourselves, we do it too much. To save ourselves, we need to sort and manage this enormous amount of information, of which we are both creators and victims. To remain imprisoned in the surface of our screen is to suffocate and be anaesthetised: social networks are not a true community and keep us divided in our cages of individualism. It is as if we were in a room with 100 other people similar to us and talking at the same time: we cannot understand anything and we cannot communicate anything. Luca Rossi’s IMAGES series was born in 2013 and does not propose yet another piece of content, yet another work of art, but a way of ordering and managing the content that is already being produced abnormally in the world every day. By searching YouTube for ‘IMG’ and four completely random numbers, we can access a completely unexpected playlist of videos that grows every day. Amateur and subtly poetic videos that would otherwise remain submerged and for which Luca Rossi’s work represents the only opening. A sort of contemporary ‘Sistine Chapel’ in which anyone can participate, through that hybrid role that the common man has assumed in the last 10 years. A role that Luca Rossi anticipated in 2009 and in which author and spectator merge and mingle. Watching these videos almost represents a form of ‘training’ for our eyes, since these videos have completely uncommon characteristics compared to the moving images we are used to watching every day.